A common goal of IT and application administrators of large infrastructures is to balance various performance goals, for example, such as maximizing the execution of tasks/operations and minimizing operating costs (e.g., energy/power consumption, etc.).
A distributed application is a software program that is composed of multiple individual parts running in a coordinated manner on multiple networked computing nodes. These parts may collectively contribute to a unified objective, such as serving web pages, running a distributed database, and running a high-performance computing (HPC) task.